“They aren’t as dumb as they look,” our facilitator said, referring to the dark gray flip phone in his hand. He just as easily could have been talking about us, the 28 New York residents before him who had signed up to use the device for the entire month of March. He explained that the relic was loaded with WhatsApp, iMessage, Google Maps, Uber, Microsoft 2FA – nothing like my seventh-grade flip phone. We each had paid $75 to participate in Month Offline, or MO, a program that challenged us to swear off our smartphones entirely. Another $25 went to dumb.co, the company behind MO, for the so-called dumbphones we would use as we navigated daily life. In its early days, MO had given out flip phones so dumb – no maps, no ride-sharing, iffy texting – that participants struggled to use them during and after the month-long experiment. So my MO cohort was the first to test dumb.co’s souped-up version, a discontinued TCL Flip 2 bolstered with the messaging and mapping functions many of us are dependent upon.…